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The number of microbusinesses and self-employed people continues to climb steadily – despite a strong labour market and many full-time opportunities – as people embrace more flexible schedules and make use of better technologies for remote work collaboration. However, most traditional retail banks have been slow to target this group, which is generally less interested in a large branch network and dissatisfied with digital.

The use of AI in global banking is estimated to grow from a $41.1 billion business to $300 billion by 2030. There is a long list of US-based FinTech companies leveraging AI, which are at the forefront of this growth story. Here is a list of 21 such exciting startups well-known for their AI tech:

Major United States-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase announced that its cryptocurrency payment processor Coinbase Commerce now supports Circle’s stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) in a blog post on May 20. Per the announcement, Coinbase Commerce users can now accept USDC payments with no transaction fees. The announcement specifies that “unlike accepting credit card payments, merchants can accept USD Coin without geographical limitations or the need for a traditional bank account.”

Financial service provider SIX is developing a stablecoin pegged to the Swiss franc, a company spokesman confirmed to Cointelegraph on May 23. The company is also planning to launch a blockchain-powered exchange for digital tokens in the second half of 2019, but the spokesman said he was currently not at liberty to discuss further details concerning whether the stablecoin will operate on that exchange.

In a matter of years, digital banks like Revolut Ltd., Starling Bank Ltd. and Monzo Bank Ltd., all based in London, have attracted several million clients by offering perks like ultra-low-cost money transfers and pre-paid debit cards with no foreign transaction fees. Yet even though people open secondary accounts with these neo-lenders, they’re still reluctant to give them their salaries—let alone make them the main conduit for their retirement savings or mortgages.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible and useful. Google has made a lot of progress on the first half of that mission statement—it may have access to more data than any other company on the planet. But making the information more useful will require software that understands the information in a more sophisticated way—which is exactly what machine learning technology could do. At I/O this week, Google sent a …

The platform supports both batch and streaming data ingestion. Google’s cloud storage or Big Query can be used to store the training data, and the built-in data-labeling service can be used for labeling. Platform users can then use existing classification, object recognition, or entity-extraction models, or import the labeled data to AutoML to train a custom model.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are becoming increasingly mainstream. The reason for this is because when applied in an organisational context effectively they can significantly enhance business outcomes. Utilising data and AI at a business level to drive the overall value of the customer is very different from using it at the tactical level to optimise a channel or clicks and warrants considerable upfront planning.

By design, Blockchain makes it easy for diverse parties to transact with one another without requiring a central authority — especially when there are varying levels of trust between them. That’s why it’s vital to create a vibrant ecosystem where participants work together to solve the same business problem.

Media coverage of artificial intelligence tends to be either euphoric or alarming. In the first variant, AI is presented as a divine technology that will solve all our problems, from curing cancer to ending global warming. In the latter, Frankenstein- or Terminator-inspired narratives depict AI as a technology that we cannot keep under control and that will be out-smarting humans in ways we cannot foresee – killing our jobs, if not threatening the survival of …

ONE AFTERNOON in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he pursed his lips into a brief smile and began to speak: “So today I’m going to be talking about different approaches to building…” He stalled, as though just realising that he …

Tokenized securities, or a security token offerings (STOs), are one of the much-hyped advancements that could help drive blockchain adoption going forward. While cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin or XRP can be seen as “digital gold” or “digital money,” and others like Ethereum or EOS can be seen as an access key to open source computing power, tokenized securities are different. While built on similar blockchain based technologies, tokenized securities are a version of digital ownership governed by smart contracts for any variety of …

Multinational 186-year-old banking group BBVA wants to evolve from its legacy heritage to a digital company, by designing its tech around the needs of its customers and removing the pain points around managing money. BBVA wants to do this by empowering customers to have a do-it-yourself banking experience in which they can choose where, when and how they bank. To get this right, the bank needed a deep understanding of customer needs and desires as they change over time.

Tech titans like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are setting their sights on the financial services sector, blurring the lines between industries and rolling out financial services that offer consumers increasingly competitive banking experiences. These tech companies are becoming a disruptive force in the banking industry as they grab market share in payments, consumer loans and even small business loans. Tech companies challenging industry status quo Banks are starting to feel the impact of tech …

Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) agreed to buy Worldpay for about $35 billion on Monday, with the U.S. financial services provider striking the biggest deal to date in the fast-growing electronic payments industry. The financial technology sector is consolidating fast, with global payments set to reach $3 trillion a year in revenue by 2023 as more people switch from cash to digital payments for online and high street sales, consulting firm McKinsey predicts.

As with all emerging technological trends, some elements of artificial intelligence (AI) are hyped out of proportion, some elements are ahead of their time and some even incite fear. However, there remains some truth beneath the hype, cycles and buzzwords. Advancements in AI stand to benefit the energy sector but come with own limitations and practical concerns.

The first wave, which was nearly 70 years ago, emphasized handcrafted knowledge, and computer scientists constructed so-called expert systems that captured the rules that the system could then apply to situations of interest. However, handcrafting rules was costly and time-consuming. The second wave that brought in machine learning that applies statistical and probabilistic methods to large data sets to create generalized representations that can be applied to future samples. However, this required training deep learning (artificial) neural networks with …

Stanford University is launching a new institute committed to studying, guiding and developing human-centered artificial intelligence technologies and applications. The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) is building on a tradition of leadership in artificial intelligence at the university, as well as a focus on multidisciplinary collaboration and diversity of thought. The mission of the institute is to advance artificial intelligence (AI) research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition.

The multimillion-dollar blockchain Tezos has officially concluded its first round of voting for two competing system-wide upgrade proposals. Not without its fair share of internal governance conflicts, today marks the official close of the first round of voting on the Tezos blockchain. The two proposals dubbed ‘Athens A’ and ‘Athens B’ are the first of its kind to undergo Tezos’ protocol amendment procedures, designed to roll out system-wide upgrades otherwise known as hard forks in an entirely …